There are various types of communication services in existence today which utilize various types of physical communication infrastructures. A cable provider utilizes coaxial cable feeding servers at a cable headend. A digital subscriber line (DSL) provider uses twisted pair copper phone lines and modems in conjunction with a central office having servers. A satellite provider utilizes orbiting satellites and antenna or satellite dishes and receivers on the ground to wirelessly provide programming to users. An Internet service provider (ISP) may use existing telephone lines connected to a server via a modem. Optical fiber may be utilized to link servers and computers on a research campus. Accordingly, different physical layer protocols, supporting different bandwidths and data rates, may be utilized on the different physical communication infrastructures. For example, certain existing telephone lines and servers may support 56 Kilobits per second (56K) communications using a personal computer equipped with a 56K modem. Optical fiber lines or unshielded twisted pair type 5 (UTP-5) lines may support 1 Gigabit Ethernet communications.
The different service providers may utilize different network provisioning protocol s, provided by different software platforms, at the logical connection level. A network provisioning protocol at the logical connection level may provide various types of communication functionality including roaming, user authentication, content delivery, caching and/or storage management, and/or addressing management. However, given the vast number of physical communication infrastructures types supporting varying types of protocols, different equipment is required to support provisioning, and integration can be expensive, time consuming and difficult.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.